Vede Ⰲ

Vede writes the consonant v and takes the numeral three. Its name is a verb form rather than a noun, the first person singular meaning I know, and it is the second word of the sentence that the opening letters of the alphabet spell out when their names are read in order.

The sound it records is the one Greek beta had come to make by the time of the mission, and that is a large part of why the Glagolitic order looks the way it does. A ninth century Byzantine reading a Greek text pronounced beta as v, so when the alphabet was arranged the letter answering to beta was given the Slavonic v, and the plain b had to be provided separately. The two letters therefore sit side by side in the Slavonic order in the reverse of the sequence a classicist would expect, with b before v, and the numeral values follow the Slavonic arrangement rather than the Greek one.

In Old Church Slavonic v is common as a preposition on its own, written as a single letter attached to the word it governs, and manuscripts show it running together with what follows in a way that can make word division difficult for a modern editor. The sound has been stable across the Slavic languages, and where an early text writes vede a modern Slavic language will still have v, so the letter offers none of the dialect evidence that yat or the nasal vowels do.

Cyrillic vedi writes the same consonant and holds the same place, and here the numeral gap between the two alphabets opens for the first time. Glagolitic gives vede the value three, counting its own letters in order. Cyrillic gives vedi the value two, the value of Greek beta, because Cyrillic assigns numbers by the Greek alphabet and the Slavic b that stands between them takes no value at all. The offset of one that begins at this letter widens further down the order as more Slavic-only signs are skipped.

The names differ by a vowel, vede against vedi, and the difference is the kind of small variation that runs through the whole pair of alphabets. Neither form is a corruption of the other. The letter names were transmitted orally in recitation as much as in writing, and the abecedaria copied out in different centuries and different regions record them with slightly different endings, so the modern reference lists have to choose among attested forms.

Beyond the name and the sound the two letters have nothing in common. The Cyrillic sign is a Greek letter taken over almost unaltered, and the Glagolitic sign is not, which is the observation that underlies the whole question of where the Glagolitic shapes came from and why it has never been closed.